Corpus Based Studies Of Translational Chinese In English Chinese Translation

This book takes a corpus-based approach, which integrates translation studies and contrastive analysis, to the study of translational language. It presents the world’s first balanced corpus of translational Chinese, which, in combination with a comparable native Chinese corpus, provides a reliable empirical basis for a comprehensive account of the macro-statistic, lexical, and grammatical features of translational Chinese in English-to-Chinese translation – a significant contribution to Descriptive Translation Studies. The research findings based on these two distinctly different languages have important implications for universal translation research on the European tradition.

This edited collection reflects on the development of Chinese corpus-based translation and interpreting studies while emphasising perspectives emerging from a region that has traditionally been given scant consideration in English-language dominated literature. Striking the balance between methodological and theoretical discussion on corpus-based empirical research into Chinese translation and interpreting studies, the chapters additionally introduce and examine a wide variety of case studies. The authors include up-to-date corpus-based research, and place emphasis on new perspectives such as sociology-informed approaches and cognitive translation studies. The book will be of interest to researchers and advanced students of translation/interpreting and contrastive linguistics studies, corpus linguistics, and Chinese linguistics.

The book addresses different areas of corpus-based translation studies, including corpus-based study of translation features, translator’s style, norms of translation, translation practice, translator training and interpreting. It begins by tracing the development of corpus-based translation studies and introducing the compilation of different types of corpora for translation research. The use of corpora in different research areas is then discussed in detail, and the implications and limitations of corpus-based translation studies are addressed. Featuring the use of figures, tables, illustrations and case studies, as well as discussion of methodological issues, the book offers a practical guide to corpus-based translation. It will be of interest to postgraduate students and professionals who are interested in translation studies, interpreting studies or computer-aided translation.

This book introduces the latest advances in Corpus-Based Translation Studies (CBTS), a thriving subfield of Translation Studies which forms an important part of both translator training and empirical translation research. Largely empirical and exploratory, a distinctive feature of CBTS is the development and exploration of quantitative linguistic data in search of useful patterns of variation and change in translation. With the introduction of textual statistics to Translation Studies, CBTS has geared towards a new research direction that is more systematic in the identification of translation patterns; and more explanatory of any linguistic variations identified in translations. The book traces the advances from the advent of language corpora in translation studies, to the new textual dimensions and shift towards a probability-variation model. Such advances made in CBTS have enabled in-depth analyses of translation by establishing useful links between a translation and the social and cultural context in which the translation is produced, circulated and consumed.

In this work, a corpus-based stylistic study is used to explore two contemporary Mandarin Chinese translations of Don Quijote - those by Yang Jiang (1978) and Liu Jingsheng (1995).

This book investigates the characteristics of hybridity in Chinese texts that have been translated from English. It also explores the potential impact of translation and hybridity on written Chinese over the past 70 years. It suggests that English-Chinese translations have introduced more and more hybrid structures into Chinese. This book can help us with understanding language change and development, and it can also shed new light on the translation process and help identify translation norms.

This book is a valuable resource for those involved in translation studies and discourse analysis. Drawing on a corpus-based approach and a combined framework of Appraisal and Ideological Square, this book investigates the variations in stance towards China and other countries in the English translation of contemporary Chinese political discourse. It presents research findings based on comparisons and statistical analyses of the English translation patterns of appraisal epithets, the most prototypical appraisal resources for evaluation, in Chinese political discourse at both lexico-grammatical and discourse semantic levels.

The corpus-based approach has developed into a well established paradigm in translation studies and has been recognised as a principal reason for the revival of contrastive linguistics since the 1990s, while corpus-based contrastive and translation studies have in turn significantly expanded the scope of corpus linguistics. This book features a selection of twenty-three papers from the 2008 meeting of Using Corpora in Contrastive and Translation Studies (UCCTS), an international conference series launched to provide an international forum for the exploration of theoretical and practical issues pertaining to the creation and use of corpora in contrastive and translation studies. The papers in this collection represent the latest developments in corpus-based translation studies, corpus-based contrastive studies, parallel corpus development and bilingual lexicography. They are useful resources for researchers as well as postgraduates and their supervisors in translation studies, comparative and contrastive linguistics, corpus linguistics, and computational linguistics.